[WIP] KerbTown v0.13 Beta - Place static buildings, cities, launch sites & more!

[Razchek]

Thanks for the info. Do you know the most optimized way to do it? Is one thing with one collision mesh any more taxing on the game than a bunch of separate ones?

I'd go with separate colliders. It's very minimal on the cost of performance with static objects that do not move.

Could someone help me with the launch site stuff? I am trying to get a wharf working as a launch site. I have placed the static on the shore and marked it as launch site. The launch site shows up in the VAB/SPH, but when i launch from there the game always puts the vessels underwater on an altitude so that they "rest" on the underwater terrain (Z=-20m) instead of at the Z-Level where the spawn-point is located (z=0, ocean surface).

http://i.imgur.com/Q52y7oA.png

That's just how it works with launch sites, before KSP can enable physics it has to "PutShipToGround". This is intended to prevent ships clipping into terrain and exploding, or being way high up and exploding, and in /most/ situations it makes a lot of sense and works well. It just so happens that over tha last month a lot of situations where it doesn't make sense have been found.

Statis are considered "ground", so if you put stuff under the launch site but shallow enough that buoyancy won't throw your ships into the air too much, this should overcome your issues. I believe PutShipToGround operates by colliders, so this could be an invisible mesh, or you could fake a little underwater shelf; ships will be able to hit it either way.

Greys is correct. This is just how KSP handles putting the ships to the ground. It needs to collide with "terrain" for it to be considered as touching the ground. Almost all static objects are set to the terrain layer automatically, so you should indeed use an invisible mesh or have a underwater shelf like Greys said.

http://i.imgur.com/IyviAni.jpg

That is awesome!

I couldn't find it.

I replied to your question also.

There are no direct tutorials for going straight from SketchUp to KSP from me. If you can use SketchUp to put a part into the game, then you can use it to put a static object into the game. Just take a read of the manual.

[oniontrain]

OK, I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I got the mesh in game, collisions are working, and it looks like it should... except it's completely white/not textured. I can't seem to find any up to date info on well, much of anything, so it's probably something simple I'm doing wrong here. Can somebody else take a look at it for me? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21315217/OTP.zip

[Razchek]

OK, I can't for the life of me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I got the mesh in game, collisions are working, and it looks like it should... except it's completely white/not textured. I can't seem to find any up to date info on well, much of anything, so it's probably something simple I'm doing wrong here. Can somebody else take a look at it for me? https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21315217/OTP.zip

It looks like you've renamed the textures outside of unity after you have exported the model. That's a no-no.

Rename the textures in Unity, then export the model.

http://i.imgur.com/HAd8d1E.jpg?1 (I renamed your two mbm files respectively: model000.mbm & model001.mbm)

[Greys]

Just got to play for the first time in a while and a lot of things went wrong

The scale of a static defines it's camera limits. If you have a scale of 10, 1, 10, then your camera becomes entirely worthless as you cannot angle it at all, all of the controls cause the camera's focus point to move along a plane, this includes zoom.

The scaled instance of my runway that I was playing with Never loaded properly, even when I was spawning things onto it, causing everything to explode repeatedly, and when I managed to halt the game before things started moving around and force focus to load the runway, if I messed up once everything on the runway would be irrevertably destroyed. I even tried deleting every other instance of that static thinking it was only loading the first instance.

[Tw1]

would become very simple for any mod to tell KerbTown "Put this here", and provide their own independent mechanics on how the player is allowed to place statics within the world; and even their own GUI if they want.

Hi people of Kerb town. I have been investigating the potential of a Simple Railways Mod.

The full idea is described in that thread, but I'm hoping to be able to use kerbtown as the means to generate rail sections at certain points.

It would have a rail maker part, that uses up EL's metal resource to make sections of track.

The idea of requiring resources to build is to prevent people spamming huge rail sections all over the planets, making rovers and landers redundant.

Ideally, the rail parts would not show up in kerbtown's own interface, but get placed somehow using thier own. Is it/could it be possible to block a part from being in the kerbtown interface like this?

Edited August 19, 2013 by Tw1

[Razchek]

Just got to play for the first time in a while and a lot of things went wrong

The scale of a static defines it's camera limits. If you have a scale of 10, 1, 10, then your camera becomes entirely worthless as you cannot angle it at all, all of the controls cause the camera's focus point to move along a plane, this includes zoom.

The scaled instance of my runway that I was playing with Never loaded properly, even when I was spawning things onto it, causing everything to explode repeatedly, and when I managed to halt the game before things started moving around and force focus to load the runway, if I messed up once everything on the runway would be irrevertably destroyed. I even tried deleting every other instance of that static thinking it was only loading the first instance.

The camera will lose accuracy on the object pivot point if the scale dimensions are not equal (i.e. 3,3,3 = good | 3,1,3 = bad).

To be honest I'm not too keen on the scale modifier for static objects - I have a personal preference to have everything preset right from the modelling application, as to avoid issues in Unity and KSP (animations for example don't play nice with some scaled objects).

I may fix the issues you've mentioned in an update.

Or on the other hand I may remove the scale feature from the plugin to enforce pre-export scaling as these are not the only issues the addition of 'scale' will create down the track.

I'm leaning towards the latter unless I can come up with a good reason to keep it.

---

Hi people of Kerb town. I have been investigating the potential of a Simple Railways Mod.

The full idea is described in that thread, but I'm hoping to be able to use kerbtown as the means to generate rail sections at certain points.

It would have a rail maker part, that uses up EL's metal resource to make sections of track.

The idea of requiring resources to build is to prevent people spamming huge rail sections all over the planets, making rovers and landers redundant.

Ideally, the rail parts would not show up in kerbtown's own interface, but get placed somehow using thier own. Is it/could it be possible to block a part from being in the kerbtown interface like this?

You can use the isYielding variable. I should hope to add external instantiation in a near future update which will help with your end goal.

STATIC
{
	name = FloatingLaunchGrounds
	module = Part
	author = Hubs
	static = true
	mesh = FloatingLaunchGround.mu
	/* .... snip .... */
	isYielding = 0 // Setting this as '0' should prevent KerbTown from displaying it in the editor interface.
	Instances
	{
		RadialPosition = 165000,-500,-578400
		RotationAngle = 0
		RadiusOffset = 3500
		Orientation = 0,1,0
		VisibilityRange = 100000
		CelestialBody = Kerbin
		LaunchSiteName = Floating Launch Ground
		Scale = 1,1,1
	}
}

Edited August 19, 2013 by Razchek

[Hooligan Labs]

I put a ton of work over the weekend into updating the camera for the submarine so it moves in a more normal way. It still needs more work, but you can check it out and the source code: http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/submarines-to-other-planets/

[Fitzy3]

I replied to your question also.

There are no direct tutorials for going straight from SketchUp to KSP from me. If you can use SketchUp to put a part into the game, then you can use it to put a static object into the game. Just take a read of the manual.

I have read the manual, and it only tells you how to create a static part/object in unity, it says nothing about sketch up.

[rasheed]

Then take some time how to learn to use it

[Greys]

I may fix the issues you've mentioned in an update.

Or on the other hand I may remove the scale feature from the plugin to enforce pre-export scaling as these are not the only issues the addition of 'scale' will create down the track.

I'm leaning towards the latter unless I can come up with a good reason to keep it.

Gonna be totally honest with you here.

I would much rather have stability than features.

And honestly scaling things is not the correct way to do it for so many reasons, the most experience impact of which is texture sizes, they scale to the object properly but the object is designed to be this big, and changing that can ruin it.

I know this was my idea... and thanks for trying... sorry~

Hopefully when you get to improving the coordinate system it becomes more reasonable to legobrick a large platform together, or maybe somebody will make a modmod interface that allows for statics to be assembled like ships via positional snap-nodes that if placed correctly ensure surfaces line up properly. This will be awesome, and not something I would expect of KerbTown.

[oniontrain]

Hmm, that's what Unity had saved them as, I guess I need to just go in and manually rename them after I do something about the normal mapping. I turned it way down in unity but that seems to have done nothing. If anybody's got any ideas on how to make it not look like something from the mid 90s when people just figured out bump mapping that would be great.

Edited August 20, 2013 by oniontrain

[rasheed]

Would it be possible to make smoke particles come out of a certain part of a launch pad when u launch?

[Razchek]

@Fitzy3; You'll need to learn how to get your sketches into Unity first. That's past the scope of the manual for this project. There are tutorials around this forum for getting your models from SketchUp into Unity. Take a look around for those.

---

@Greys; It was implemented more or less to see how things would roll with KerbTown. I didn't think of the other consequences at the time - but yes, it's going to cause a lot of issues non-KerbTown related as well which is going to make the user experience a lot less enjoyable, so I will reconsider an alternative down the track. For now I have removed the scaling feature.

As for the object connections; when I get onto the mouse placement code I will have to think about using the "node" system for snapping the objects together much like you would in the VAB/SPH.

---

@oniontrain; Unusual that they were exported like that. You should edit the normal map texture to reduce it's intensity.

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@rasheed; Definitely possible. But you will need to write that as a module yourself.

[TheCardinal]

It makes me think of Kerbal Space Center after a failed launch attempt of a new atomic engine.

[Snjo]

Hmm, that's what Unity had saved them as, I guess I need to just go in and manually rename them after I do something about the normal mapping. I turned it way down in unity but that seems to have done nothing. If anybody's got any ideas on how to make it not look like something from the mid 90s when people just figured out bump mapping that would be great.

If you normal maps look crazy, it's probably the part tools corrupting them on export, which happens to me too. the resulting file will look too purple and low quality. Delete that exported file, and use the original normal map image in the ksp folder instead.

[Cheebsta]

Usually normal map intensity is controlled from the software that made the normal map, or in the gradients you use when making them. If you're just turning RGB images into normal maps expect them to look a little crappy without some touching up.

[Snjo]

Convert grayscale bump maps to normal maps with this Nvidia Photoshop plugin

Then you can just throw the resulting file straight into the part folder without using the one exported by KSP part tools.

Obviously it's nowhere near baking a normal map from high poly.

[itsreallyreallytrue]

Anyone know if it would be possible to take something like this procedural city generator and incorporate into a kerbtown plugin? I don't know much about unity or ksp plugins.

[HoY]

A Little bit overdue, but here's the Eve EasterEgg video!

[Devo]

ahaha way cool, i need to figure out how to make the moving platforms now

[Razchek]

As HoY said, way overdue for the Eve video - so I've posted a short preview to the first post!

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@itsreallyreallytrue; Yeah for sure, but you would need to rework the code.

[Gojira]

Would it be possible to have Kerbtown launch from KSC2?

[skykooler]

Would it be possible to have Kerbtown launch from KSC2?

Sure - just make a launchpad part without much geometry, put it there, and mark it as a launch pad.

[LaydeeDem]

I'm making something for Nyrath's Orion mod, figured I should post it here:

[rasheed]

So Raz. Instead of erm.. Having to write my own module (i can't do it). Making it so that adding a certain gameobject at a certain angle emit smoke on launch.